Getting out, she huddled into her thin wool coat. April in New England on the ocean translated into thirty days of bitter, wet wind that chilled you to the bone and wreaked havoc on your hair. And that wasn’t the worst of it—there were puddles all over the place, even when it hadn’t rained. Everything in town seemed to drip, like the city was a sponge that had surpassed its capacity . . . the cars, the buildings, the spindly trees, all of it wicking the moisture out of the air and channeling it down onto the perma-damp asphalt and concrete beneath your feet.

Definitely more L.L. Bean than Louboutin.

At the front door of the house, she craned in for a closer look at a seventies-era intercom that had three little buttons. Per Isaac’s instructions, she punched the one on the bottom.

A moment later, the ring was answered by a woman dressed in a retina-busting, retro afghan the size of a bed-sheet. Her hair was cranked into corkscrew curls the color of a Halloween pumpkin and there was a cigarette between the painted fingertips of her right hand.

Evidently, her look had gotten stuck in the same era as the intercom.

“You’re Isaac’s girl?”

Grier stuck her hand out and did not correct the statement. Figured it was better than “attorney.” “I’m Grier.”

“He called here.” The woman stepped back. “Told me to let you in. You know, you don’t seem like his type.”

A quick image of the man sitting so silent and deadly flashed through Grier’s mind: on that theory, the guy should have been dating a Beretta.

“Opposites attract,” she said as she looked over the landlady’s shoulder. Down at the end of the tight hall, the staircase loomed in the distance like a spiritual beacon, at once apparent and yet unattainable.

“Well . . .” The landlady lounged against her flocked wallpaper. “There’s opposites, like one person is a talker and the other isn’t. And there’s opposites. How did you meet?”

As her nosy stare locked on Grier’s gold necklace, there was the temptation to answer, “the penal system,” just to see how far the woman’s eyes would bug. “We were matched up.”

“Oh, like eHarmony?”

“Precisely.” The main points of compatibility being his requiring someone with a law degree to get him bail and her having a JD from Harvard. “Will you let me in his place now?”

“You’re in a hurry. You know, my sister tried eHarmony. The guy she met was a frickin’ jerk.”

It turned out that getting the landlady up the stairs took about as much effort as throwing her over a shoulder and carrying her to the third floor. However, ten minutes of question deflection later, they were finally at the door.

“You know,” the landlady said as she put her keys to work and unlocked things, “you should think about—”